Creative Writing Lessons

Hey everyone. I'm putting together my own creative writing curriculum with lesson plans for school (I'm studying to become an English teacher). Just wondering if you had taken any creative writing classes, what subjects did you cover? Is there anything else you'd like to learn that they left out? I haven't started yet but I just wanted some outside opinions from a group of people who share a passion for writing. What would your perfect creating writing class include?

- Character Development
- Genres
- Publication
- Conflicts
etc.

Do you have any examples of activities, assignments, or anything that inspired you? I'm just trying to get a collection of ideas to get started with and eventually get creative with.

- writing dialogue:
exercises on listening and writing down 'real' dialogue that students overhear, and then deciding how to convey the essence of it--dialogue in creative writing is rarely an exact transcript of actual real-life dialogue.

- basic formatting, punctuation, and grammar skills for creative writing:
before students can start on the shortest story, there are certain rules to get to grips with if they want their stuff to be understood by an average reader.

- how to link paragraphs, sentences and ideas, particularly in a time frame:
it's always a temptation to write 'first...' 'then...' 'suddenly...' 'while/as...' and use clunky participles like 'LookING up, John noticed that the spaceship was coming lower...', but these linking methods are more suited to academic than creative writing. Students could explore different ways to write which show the progression of time and events.

Also, in order to develop style awareness, you might like to have your students each choose a novel by a contemporary writer that they admire and find a short passage from one of his/her novels to bring to class. You could compare how you think the writer conveys ideas, feelings, drama etc and what kind of language is used (short sentences, a lot of/very little dialogue, simple/complex vocabulary etc).

Poetry, essay writing and even song lyrics can fall under creative writing. There is nothing wrong with narrowing the scope of the lessons, but a full creative writing curriculum would cover or touch upon all major areas.

There should be some examples of such curriculum or at least a syllabus or two online if you search for them.